Arresting the poor for not having plumbing

wv wrote:

Blaming the poor for not having plumbing… See this is why I hate politicians who only wanna talk about “the middle class” and the problems of the middle class…

w
v

A Toilet, but No Proper Plumbing: A Reality in 500,000 U.S. Homes

…Ms. Rudolph, a retired seamstress, and her husband, a carpenter, live in a tiny, white clapboard house that he built after he, his parents and his siblings fled their home on land owned by a white man who forbade the family to vote. She remembers, as a young girl in the 1950s, not having electricity. They obtained running water in the early 1990s, she said, and used an outhouse until the mid-1990s.

So their white toilet with a fuzzy green cover was a marker of progress.
…

…The state health department begs, cajoles, and eventually cites people who have problems and do not fix them. In the early 2000s, the authorities even tried arresting people. That prompted a public outcry and the practice soon stopped, but one person spent a weekend in jail and others were left with criminal records.

The department cited about 700 people in the 12 months that ended in March, often because someone complained…. see link

Sanders rarely talked about the poor. And he’s well to the left of the Dems on most issues. Which tells me that being “radical” these days is equivalent to being a mainstream “liberal” forty years ago.

RFK, when he ran in 1968, spoke repeatedly about the actual poor, went to the Delta to see it real time; went to the Native American reservations to see it real time; quoted Camus on social justice and equality and human rights. I can’t remember the last US politician since RFK was killed who has done that. Even just talking about it, much less offering actual programs and policies to remedy it — which RFK also did.

And, in 1968, there would have been a goodly bit of real estate to RFK’s left, of course. A ton. He was probably “left-liberal” at the time, but not “radical,” relatively speaking.

Today? No one gives speeches on those subjects anymore. The Greens rarely break out of the “middle class” paradigm either.

Thinking about my younger self, projecting how the world would look in the future from that point . . . . and now, thinking about it now, on the edge of a card carrying “senior citizen” . . . . Makes me want to weep — mostly for what never happened and how much ground was lost.

Well, i guess there’s just no votes to be had in talking about the poor. Ya know. Itz all about the ‘middle class’.

Well, there’s two memes that the middle and upper class believe about the poor that are so ridiculous it’s impossible to fathom. Yet they believe them anyway…

1. The poor have it easy.

2. The poor are poor by choice (ie they don’t want to work).

I see those ideas repeated endlessly in conversations among friends and coworkers and on social media.

As long as that sort of attitude exists among the ‘haves’ the politicians trying to win their votes won’t see a percentage in talking about the ‘havenots’.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by nittany ram.

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Well, there’s two memes that the middle and upper class believe about the poor that are so ridiculous it’s impossible to fathom. Yet they believe them anyway…

1. The poor have it easy.

2. The poor are poor by choice (ie they don’t want to work).

I see those ideas repeated endlessly in conversations among friends and coworkers and on social media.

As long as that sort of attitude exists among the ‘haves’ the politicians trying to win their votes won’t see a percentage in talking about the ‘havenots’.

—————–
There might be a third meme — something along the lines of

“Well, golly shucks, there’s always been poor people, and as tragic as it is,
there’s nothing we can do about it. Its the natural order of things. Best we can do
is build some homeless shelters and contribute to charities”

Ya know. Anything but examining the ‘system’.

w
v

Great points, WV — and Nittany.

To me, this isn’t rocket science. Pretty much from the beginning of organized societies, the few have ruled the many. It’s still that way, obviously. Capitalism was supposed to “liberate” the masses from the yoke of tyrannical kings and queens and aristocracy in general — and most conservatives believe it has. But it’s really just created a legal set of fictions to control the masses by other means — their bodies, their time at work, at home as consumers, and so on. It just created a new kind of ruling class.

The few still set the price for the many. They tell us how much we’re supposedly worth as humans, and what we can do and can’t do while at work. It’s a far more sophisticated sort of tyranny, but it’s tyranny of the few over the many all the same.

But none of that is inevitable, or destiny, or natural. It’s a system, designed for the powerful, by the powerful, to perpetuate the rule of the few over the many.

All it would take to end poverty, homelessness, hunger, famine and the like is to have the many rule themselves. True democratic self-rule. There is just no way that a system designed by the many for the many would allow the many to be screwed by the few again. It’s ONLY because it’s always been the few ruling everything that we’ve had this perpetuation of neck-breaking hierarchies, massive inequalities, poverty, etc.

We outnumber them — overwhelmingly.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

To me, this isn’t rocket science. Pretty much from the beginning of organized societies, the few have ruled the many. It’s still that way, obviously. Capitalism was supposed to “liberate” the masses from the yoke of tyrannical kings and queens and aristocracy in general — and most conservatives believe it has. But it’s really just created a legal set of fictions to control the masses by other means — their bodies, their time at work, at home as consumers, and so on. It just created a new kind of ruling class.

———–
Agreed.

This new form of empire-oppression that modern corporate-capitalism imposed
is in some ways the same ole sorry ass repression. Ya know. The few oppressing the many.

But the ‘way’ the few are doing it is interesting. The many have had their minds colonized.

Maybe thats how its always been done, i dunno. Maybe the many used to ‘believe’ in the divine right of the few to rule. And now they believe in the divine right of the ‘free market’. I dunno.

But i do know that the entire biosphere was not being poisoned back in the olden days. Etc.

w
v

It’s pretty clever, if you think about it. Being simplistic here, to save space: In the past, under kings and queens, people kinda had to do what they were told or they were jailed, tortured or killed out right.

Under capitalism, there’s a bargain of sorts. People think they’re getting something in return for giving up their personal autonomy. They get bright, shiny objects in return for being compliant with the masters. They probably don’t realize that with each transaction, they’re more and more dependent upon those masters, and more slave-like, because they have their Netflix and their Iphones and their washing machines, etc. etc. And, over time, we’ve all been conditioned — as you say, colonized — that there is no other way.

And, without a complete break with this system, there isn’t, really. We’re too far removed from self-provisioning to make it on our own now. We’re too dependent on machines and gadgets and “the markets” to get us what we need to survive. We used to do the vast majority of this ourselves, and what we couldn’t do, we got from our neighbors, and what they couldn’t do, they got from us and so on.

We’re “evolving” into more and more dependence on fewer and fewer corporations for our survival. And all that talk from “conservatives” about dependence on government is absurd, because it totally leaves out the part about dependence on far off, unaccountable, unseen men (and a few women) in suits — in the private sector.

True independence means independence from both the private and the public sectors. It means a return to community, small is beautiful, independent markets and as much self-provisioning as humanly possible. And that’s the way out of poverty too.

As things stand right now, IMO, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle, unless we ditch capitalism altogether. Unless we ditch the legal concept of one person owning the work of many, or a few people owning the work of the many, we’re far, far from “independent,” by definition, and we’re even further away from being able to solve poverty, hunger, homelessness and the like.

wv wrote:

But the ‘way’ the few are doing it is interesting. The many have had their minds colonized.

That’s always been true.

Peasants didn’t accept the rule of lords solely through force of arms. They bought into the system.

That’s why we invented the theory of ideology.

Why do any majorities accept the rule of minorities? Which is how most of history works.

Because the thinking of the majority basically accepts the system they’re in. Ie…ideology.